For U.S. sled squad, a happy deluge of publicity

Ceremonial return of lost and found luge sleds casts spotlight on unheralded sport.

March 05, 2013|Daniel Patrick Sheehan | In The Burbs

Gordy Sheer has a sense of humor. Good thing, because since his inadvertent luge sled giveaway a couple of weeks ago, he's heard it all.

Sheer, you may remember reading, is a 1998 U.S. Olympic silver medalist who scouts talent for the U.S. Luge Association of Lake Placid, N.Y. He was doing that at Blue Mountain Ski Area on Feb. 20 when he forgot to latch the back of his U-Haul and, driving back to his hotel, lost five of the training sleds he had been carting about.

"I had that 'Oh, no' moment when I realized I had dropped the sleds," he recalled, back at the Carbon County ski area Tuesday afternoon where he was finally reunited with the sleds and met the man responsible for rescuing them, Mike Miller of Moore Township.

Miller, it seems, was driving home from work when he saw a heap of sleds sitting by the side of the road in front of a house in East Allen Township. He thought the homeowner might be selling them or giving them away, so he stopped and asked.

The homeowner said he had found the sleds lying in the street and pulled them to the curb so no one would hit them. He had no use for them. So Miller, a father of three children named Lilly, Emma and Michael who love sledding and other snow sports, loaded up the sleds — worth about $400 each — and took them home.

By this time, Sheer had reported the loss to the state police at Bethlehem. He said a gentleman named Trooper Hooper — honest — took the details, and Cpl. Pete Candianis issued a news release.

The great and efficient machinery of Lehigh Valley media churned to life, carrying stories of the missing sleds to all corners of the nation. Even the mighty New York Times carried the news under the sober headline "Five Sleds from United States Luge Team Are Missing."

Before long one of Mike Miller's friends was on the phone, telling him the cops were looking for those luge sleds (which, by the way, is an example of bilingual redundancy, as luge is French for sled).

Miller, a mild-mannered and law-abiding fellow, called police, and before long the sleds were in custody, ready to be retrieved.

That might have been the end of it, but the U.S. Luge Association has an avid publicity director named Sandy Caligiore, who saw a grand opportunity to draw some attention to the sport in a non-Olympic year.

He arranged to have Sheer and the Miller family meet at the luge course at Blue Mountain, so the Millers could give the sleds back and Sheer could give the Millers some official luge team gear, and everyone could pose for pictures.

He invited Candianis, too, and a 16-year-old Allentonian named Theresa Buckley, who had nothing to do with the sleds in question but was discovered on a luge scouting session at Blue Mountain a while back (it could happen to you!) and now travels the world with the association's Junior National Team.

Miller's sister, Barbara Atkinson, also came along, as did his mother, Margaret. His wife Sarah, however, could not attend, because the family's Labrador retriever was giving birth to a litter of pups.

"Ten so far," Atkinson told me. "It's an exciting day."

Sheer, as I mentioned, has heard an earful since the episode, but takes the ribbing good-naturedly. He even laughed politely when I told him someone in my office had called him "The Biggest Luger."

"We joke that our new marketing strategy is throwing sleds out the back of a U-Haul," he said.

In truth, the lost-and-found sleds have cast more attention on luge than any event outside the Olympics. ESPN carried the story. So did Fox News.

"It's the luge story of the year," said Sheer, marveling over his happy accident.